Winners of Science Visualization Challenge announced

Every now and again, it's worthwhile to take a step back and remember that, on top of all the other features it has, science can be seriously cool. Science and the National Science Foundation have now given us the excuse to take that step back: the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge entries have been judged, and the winning entries chosen. Science will be populating their site with the winners today, but I'll take the chance to give you a quick preview.

Mario DeStefano of Naples was the winner in the photography section for this image, which he entitled The Glass Forest. The trees here are diatoms, unicellular aquatic creatures that fashion a cell wall from silica, rather than organic or calcified materials. Each of the fan-like diatoms is approximately 30 microns across, and they're growing on the surface of a marine invertebrate. The initial source was an electron microscope, so please recognize that the colors are supplied by DeStefano

This is a slightly cropped version of an image that earned honorable mention, which also is a false colored electron micrograph, taken by Jessica D. Schiffman and Caroline L. Schauer of Drexel University. The color scheme was apparently provided by the movie Little Shop of Horrors and, for the right victim, these things are a source of horror: they're the suckers that line the arms of a squid, which they use to grasp prey. I'd always read about how these get their grip from pressure differences, but the image makes clear that there's a very toothy backup system here.

The last one I'll highlight here comes courtesy of Donald Bliss and Sriram Subramaniam of the National Library of Medicine (you can click it to get a full-sized version). It's a single cancer cell, with a dark nucleus, red mitochondria, and the endoplasmic reticulum colored gold. To get it, the researchers had to use a technique that I didn't even realize existed. It's a three-dimensional image stack, where each image is a surface electron micrograph, with each slice of the image stack being only 20 nanometers apart.

Those among us paying attention will be realize that cells don't consist of a stack of surfaces 20nm apart. That's where the technique comes in. After acquiring a single surface image, the sample was blasted with a stream of gallium ions, which eroded off 20nm worth of cell. Once done, another surface image could be taken, and the cycle repeated to image completely through the cell. It's pretty impressive stuff, and well worth its honorable mention in the visualization category.

Check back later, as Science will eventually populate that page with all the winners, including some interactive websites that took home prizes.